ON FEBRUARY 28, 1962, twenty-six filmmakers joined forces at the
Oberhausen Short Film Festival to boldly proclaim that "The old cinema is
dead. We believe in the new." In the two and a half decades since, this
declaration has come to be known as the Oberhausen Manifesto, and the
resulting film movement in West Germany has been labeled Das Neue
Kino, or "New German Cinema." Alexander Kluge, one of the original
signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto along with Wim Wenders, Werner
Herzog, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, has a remarkably eclectic background
as a lawyer, teacher, writer, and philosopher, and he has been hailed as
the intellectual father of Das Neue Kino.

Unfortunately, Das Neue Kino has not found an audience in its
native country, and the reasons for its economic foundering are easy to
discern. In his effort to replace the conventional narrative of commercial
cinema with a "counter-cinema of ideas," Kluge has produced a number of
films that have been called abstract, extremely intellectual, and difficult
to understand. Judging from the two films being shown Thursday at the
Museum of Fine Arts -- which are, curiously, his most difficult and most
accessible films -- one should add "problematic successes" and "fascinating
failures" to the growing list of terms used to describe Kluge's body of
work.

stars Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos ("Artists Under the
Big Top: Perplexed") was made in 1967 and can best be described as a
collection of mostly self-contained sequences that appear to be tied
together loosely or not at all. It's more than a collection of unrelated
shorts, but the film deliberately eschews any narrative or plot structure
in the conventional sense.

In between its numerous excursions runs a thread of material focusing on a
young woman named Leni Peickert (Hannelore Hoger). She inherits a circus
from her deceased father Manfred, whose ultimate dream was to create the
spectacle of an elephant performing an aerial ballet at the top of the
circus tent. Peickert and the film point out that the classical circus was
born around the time of the French Revolution, and that it glorifies the
omnipotence of humans over animals and nature in general. Rejecting this
basic tenet of classical circus, Peickert sets out to reform the circus and
to present "animals as they authentically are."

This goal immediately transforms Peickert into an allegorical figure.
Clearly, Kluge is using the problems of the classical circus to create a
metaphor for the state of filmmaking that he and other Oberhausen Manifesto
signatories were trying to reform. This is a most fascinating comparison,
since Kluge merges two processes that are usually thought of separately,
the process of reform and the process of artistic creation. What's more, it
is from this synthesis that the film's central topic of the nature of the
barriers that inhibit or hinder these equivalent processes emerges. Kluge's
efforts not only call attention to a seldom-addressed issue, but also give
Kluge's audience a handle with which they can discover the film's numerous
underlying dimensions and complexities.

Kluge's manipulations of plot and circumstance clear the way for him to
focus on the Peickert's external pressures, such as the inertial weight of
tradition, reactions from conservative forces, and most damning of all,
public indifference. As might be expected, it is in the external resistance
to her ideas that Peickert finds the heaviest pressure to succumb, closely
mirroring the state of the Oberhausen signatories in the mid-1960s. They
remained a fairly close-knit group, many of them making collective films
together, but they were feeling pressures from all sides since their
movement had failed to justify itself economically.

Kluge's metaphor is indeed contrived, but it is contrived to reflect a
particularly urgent reality: when Peickert fails to reform her circus in
spite of the advantages working in her favor, she inexplicably moves into
television, which also happened to Kluge in the 1970s. Kluge has been
criticized for this alarming aspect of his metaphor, since his omission of
any hint of a solution casts a despairing and gloomy vision of the future
of the New German Cinema.

Strangely, it was not Kluge's intention to create an existentialist
exploration of despair. In fact, Kluge recently declared that through
collective work in television, the Oberhausen group will finally reach the
mainstream audience and make a lasting mark. Whether this will consolidate
the movement remains to be seen, but this stance can hardly be called
despairing.

Kluge's whole approach in this film involves working in short, fragmented
pieces to replace or add to the conventional meaning ascribed to images and
sounds. As might be expected, this causes the film to meander all over the
landscape, a major weakness. Consequently, Kluge's work is just flawed
enough -- in spite of its giant intellectual strides -- that it remains
doubtful whether Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: Ratlos could have
singlehandedly heralded the birth of a new cinema. That is why for those
looking back at the twenty-odd years of cinematic history since the film's
release, Kluge's film will remain a problematic success.

stars Unfortunately, the only way to characterize Kluge's 1973 film
Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin ("Part-Time Work of a Domestic
Slave") is as a fascinating failure. The film focuses on a 29-year-old
woman named Roswitha Bronski (AlexandraNote: this is not a mistake.
Alexandra is Alexander's sister Kluge) who performs illegal abortions
to help support her husband and three kids. The film begins on a jarring
but fascinating note with extremely graphic footage of what appears to be
an actual abortion -- including the extraction of the fetus from the
woman's vagina.

The rest of the film goes downhill from there, however, as the police
close down Bronski's abortion clinic and Bronski becomes a political
activist. She first tries to convince the local newspaper to join her
crusade and then attempts to organize a militant union of workers at the
chemical plant where her husband is employed. Both of these campaigns end
in failure, and the film closes with Bronski selling sausages wrapped in
political pamphlets to continue her efforts.

The film is ostensibly a feminist work, and Bronski is one of Kluge's
most sympathetic and accessible heroines. But the film's feminist
perspective never really materializes into anything intellectually or
emotionally concrete, and the whole film is severely marred by voice-overs
from an unseen male narrator whose tone can only be described as unctuous,
condescending, and patronizing. Kluge portrays Bronski as a sincere
activist, but she seems hopelessly na"ive, and her actions are usually for
nought. Feminists have rightly criticized this film for its weak-handed
portrayal of Bronski.

Gelegenheitsarbeit einer Sklavin is fascinating mainly for the
question of how Kluge -- given his previous accomplishments -- could make
such a failure.